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Sifting Through The Tea Leaves Of MacBook Pro “nano” Rumors

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

by Charles W. Moore

If no new Apple subnotebook materializes at Macworld Expo, there are going to be an awful lot of surprised, disappointed, and frustrated small ‘Book fans. Now more than 18 months since the 12” PowerBook was discontinued, pent-up demand for a replacement Apple subnotebook is reaching a sort of critical mass.

Of course this has happened before. Apple pulled the plug on the PowerBook 2400c in 1998 and didn’t get around to replacing it until either May, 2001 or January, 2003 depending on whether you consider the 12” dual USB iBook an acceptable successor or held out for the 12” aluminum PowerBook. Either way, it makes 18 months a relatively short dry spell by comparison.

However, I’m not inclined to imagine that it will take three or four years this time around. For one thing, Apple is a lot more interested in miniaturized computing platforms than it used to be what with the iPhone and iPod touch revolution. The recent aluminum iMac has a more than subtle iPhonish theme, and one can safely anticipate that a subnotebook will carry this trend substantially farther.

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As to whether a MacBook Pro nano will have a touchscreen, I think that’s a long shot, although I wouldn’t entirely rule it out, and partly based on reports from industry-watchers in the far East that Apple is loading up on Lcd-Illuminated TFT displays and partly on deduction, my guess is that the new subnotebook will come with a 12” or 13” conventional laptop display with LCD backlighting. I’m hoping that it will be available with either a glossy or matte surface optionally as is the case with the larger MacBook Pros.

This week rumor site Apple Insider reported a gunmetal grey aluminium device having been seen ‘floating around’ Apple’s Cupertino, California campus, while analysts Ben Reitzes and Gene Munster of UBS and Piper Jaffray respectively are quoted suggesting that “Although we were anticipating an ‘ultraportable’ device with an 8-inch to 11-inch screen, our checks indicate the screen will likely be 11 inches to 13 inches,” Munster wrote. “That said, we continue to expect the ‘ultraportable’ MacBook to be Apple’s thinnest and lightest ever. It will likely be priced between the $1,099 consumer-level MacBook and the $1,999 MacBook Pro.”

I think these guys are probably correct in their range of prognostication, and that a 12” widescreen is the most likely display size. Using the same 13.3” display as the MacBook would oblige a larger footprint than true subnotebook are hoping for, with one of their reasons for disdaining the MacBook is that it’s just too darned big.

The other major quandaries are whether the new subnotebook will have solid-state NAND Flash data storage instead of a conventional electromechanical hard drive, and if there will be an internal optical drive or not

Here is an outline of what I’m anticipating:
• Very thin form factor, probably not as thin as the new Apple aluminum keyboards, but trending toward that.
• Styling theme - think iPhone
• 12” widescreen display 1280 x 800 resolution
• LED display backlighting
• 2- 2.4 GHz Intel mobile CPU, maybe Santa Rosa, maybe the new Penryn mobile processor
• 1 GB RAM upgradable to 4 GB
• 64 GB NAND Flash data storage (although I’m still equivocal about this, and won’t be terribly surprised if it has a hard drive of 120 GB and up, at least as an option)
• ATI Radeon X1900 GPU with 256MB VRAM (as opposed to the MacBook’s integrated “vampire” video)
• Lithium Polymer battery providing up to six hours runtime
• Dual-layer SuperDrive, but not necessarily inside the main notebook case. The old PowerBooks 100 and 2400c both had bundled external floppy drives, and I won’t be surprised at all if Apple goes with something like this to help achieve a shockingly thin case profile. I can’t imagine them selling a machine at the premium price of $1,700-plus without some sort of optical drive solution included. You still have to install software, and not everything is downloadable from the Internet. Likewise, some sort of backup and data copying medium is really indispensable or maybe you just want to watch a movie on the 12” widescreen.
• 3 pounds weight or less
• iSight, Bluetooth, 802.11b/g/n, Firewire 400 (and maybe 800), USB2.0, 10/100/1000 Ethernet, audio in/out, mini-DVI
• Price at $1,750 - $1,799

I stress that all this is educated-guess speculation, but if Apple actually delivers a product with something like the above specification and feature set, they should sell like proverbial hotcakes.

Frankly, it’s difficult to imagine how they will be able to manage a few-compromises inventory of features like that in a tiny form factor weighing more than a pound less than the 12” PowerBook did, even with an external optical drive. I really hope they can, because it sounds awesome, but remember that it took eight months before they figured out how to cram FireWire 800 and a dual-layer SuperDrive into the full-sized 15” MacBook Pro.

A 2 GHz to 2.4 GHz dual-core processor should supply plenty of processing grunt for anyone other than complete speed freaks, who probably aren’t all that interested in subcompact notebooks anyway, and hopefully the relatively modest clock speed will help keep temperatures down to a tolerable level.

One thing I really hope they do follow through with is a real graphics processor unit instead of the half-baked GMA X3100 technology used in the MacBook that annexes some of the system RAM for video support duty. I know that some people with MacBooks say this doesn’t cramp their style significantly, but benchmarking by sites like BareFeats that have run direct comparisons indicated that video performance is indeed compromised, and while that may be acceptable in a “consumer” notebook, and it must be acknowledged that Apple packs a ton of features and value into MacBooks for the prices they sell for, nobody wants to accept too much compromise in a $1,799 professional machine.

That was what was so great about the 12’ PowerBook - it was small, but it was a real PowerBook with a pretty comprehensive range of professional laptop features, absent a few non-crucial ones like a PC CardBus slot, a second RAM expansion slot, and its bigger brothers’ illuminated keyboard. It had a real graphics accelerator with a respectable amount of VRAM that could drive big external monitors, just as good a keyboard as its larger siblings, and an available SuperDrive. Of course it wasn’t possible to cram everything available in the 15” and 17” units in, but the LittleAl PowerBook could serve as a professional workhorse laptop with no apologies necessary.

The same went for the PowerBook 2400c, which sported pretty much the same 180 MHz PCI PowerPC 603e motherboard with 256k L2 cache as in the contemporaneous full-sized PowerBook 3400c, also using the 3400’s video sub-system with a built-in VGA connector port. Built for Apple by IBM Japan, the 2400c was small, sleek, and lightweight (at 4.4 pounds the lightest Apple portable ever so far). There were of course some compromises, such as the aforementioned external floppy drive module, and also a much smaller than standard sized (87%) keyboard, but at least it was a really good scissors-action keyboard - the same technology Apple used for the superb G3 Series keyboards.

I’ve always been puzzled as to why Apple did not keep the 2400 in production, and even upgrade it to G3 status, since that would have been dirt-simple to do, given that its processor was mounted on a removable daughtercard, and third-party vendors indeed did offer G3 upgrades for this much-loved machine, which unfortunately went out of production in 1998.

However, the 2400c, short production run notwithstanding, was a real PowerBook , as was its predecessor in Apple’s compact laptop slot, the PowerBook Duo which debuted in October, 1992.
The baby MacBook Pro should be no less than fully a MacBook Pro.

Whatever, it will be a welcome addition to the family, and there should be lots of eager customers. Will I be one of them? We’ll have to wait and see. I was very content using a 12” dual USB iBook as my main production machine for three years, and would have been more than satisfied with a 12” PowerBook, or for that matter a PowerBook 2400c in its day. The pertinent issue here is whether the MacBook Pro nano (or whatever it’s called) turns out to be a machine that can be practically applied to production work, or will it be something of a hybrid suited only for use on the road.

Not long now, at least hopefully, until that question is answered.

Merry Christmas, or if you don’t celebrate Christmas, have a great Winter holiday!

CM